Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday June 11, 2011 @07:50PM
from the division-of-labor-limited-by-extent-of-market dept.

capedgirardeau writes with a clipping from the AP about engineer Ken Yankelevitz: "[W]ith the retired Bozeman engineer's 70th birthday approaching, disabled gamers say they fear there will be no one to replace Yankelevitz, who has sustained quadriplegic game controllers for 30 years almost entirely by himself. The retired aerospace engineer hand makes the controllers with custom parts in his Montana workshop, offering them at a price just enough to cover parts."Yankelevitz builds interfaces to control an Xbox 360 or PlayStation.

Microsoft and Sony should build these controllers to increase their reputation, so that people will see them as "savior of the disabled". This gives them one extra chance to do massive evil.

The "dynamics of capitalism" is just market force. It doesn't have to be capitalism actually.

North Korea wouldn't be building these controllers (even if there are to be 360s sold there) as it isn't seen to be beneficial to the country, it's better for people to focus on work. All the funding needed to get the controller

The argument that Microsoft and Sony should build these controllers to increase their reputation, but do not because of market forces seems contradictory to me.

In other words, Microsoft and Sony should NOT build these controllers because the cost to do so would outweigh the small increase to their reputation that would result. After all, companies commonly do charitable things to increase their reputation. So who do we blame when it stops being advantageous for them to do so? Most want to blame the compa

You would think that taking a loss on a thousand controllers per year would be worth a bit of positive press to compete with lots of negative press over things like rootkits and getting hacked. I mean can't you just see the "Sony cares" ads?

and also due the dynamics of capitalism, someone else fills in the void, in this case it's Mr. Yankelevitz.

Didn't bother to read the article, did you?

Mr. Yankelevitz didn't recognize a profitable niche market and use his small-business agility to step in where the big guys couldn't. He's selling these controllers for the cost of materials and giving away his time, skills, and experience for free. He's not making money and has no expectation of a return on the time and effort he's expended, ever. It would be impossible for him to make a living wage manufacturing these devices at his current price point.

Charity is part of the free market. This is capitalism, which is all about free trade i.e. not having the government interfere in the economic lives of individuals.

With that sort of logic then religion, communism and even Government interference are part of the free market too. The latter especially if the Government is bought or supplied by the Corporations;).

Q) How many free market capitalists does it take to change a lightbulb?A) Free market capitalists don't change lightbulbs. They sit in the darkness writing academic crap[1] and wait for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand[2] to do stuff.

[1] If you're going to say charity is part of the free market then free market the

Then as I already said, the buying of governments can also be part of the free market. Willing buyer, willing seller = voluntary transaction. In that case Government interference is also part of the free market.And in the case where the voters elect a government, it is also part of the free market too. After all using your reasoning, voting is just another transaction. In such a case there would be no point grumbling about Government interference getting in the way of the free market. By your logic, governm

OK, now that we've eliminated that one case. How about the other case where the government isn't elected, but bought instead.The entities consensually doing the transaction may negatively affect those who are not directly involved in the transaction.

Would that that mean it is not a free market transaction as long the transaction has negative effects/impact on others?

Or is that transaction still a "free market" transaction (willing buyer, willing seller), but the subsequent acts by the Government might not b

Quads spend most of their time confined to a bed. A game controller build to meet their needs opens worlds of interactive entertainment to people who would otherwise be limited to passive consumption (television) or limited interaction via a visual keyboard.

captcha: network

And thats what these people gain: a greater network of human interaction. Shame on you for pissing on that.

Sony and Microsoft are unmotivated to fill a niche market due to the low ROI of the research involved. I am not saying anything about the market as a whole, only the participation of the first-party manufacturers within it. Please kindly die in a fire.

Shouldn't this be something Microsoft and Sony should be doing anyway?

No it should be done by an entrepreneur who will fill a niche and make a living doing do. That's how capitalism is supposed to work. Expecting the behemoths to do so and then being snarky to them for not doing it shows your failure to understand capitalism and self-reliance.

I was going to say "...but bespoke engineering in small quantities is exactly what he's been doing for 30 years." and then realized he started doing it when he retired and charged just enough to cover his costs, so he wasn't actually making a living out of it. Really the only person - or people - who could take over are other people with the required skills who don't need to make a living out of it but have the time to spare.

Many companies make right-handed ergonomic or gaming mice, but few make them for left handers. Lefties are about 10% of the population, and it isn't a big enough market for them to bother with. I don't know the percentage of quadriplegics, but I'd wager it's ay least 4 orders of magnitude less.

Don't forget that in a world where console manufacturers were forced to make their consoles accessible to people with disabilities, there basically wouldn't be a Wii (or PS Move, or Kinect).

Until a few months ago, a friend of mine was dating a girl who worked as a therapist in a centre that helped people recover after "life changing" accidents or surgery - in other words, people who found themselves suddenly lacking (or at least lacking the use of) an arm, a leg or more. They didn't take younger kids - that

So, in a world where developers were required by law to make their products fully accessible,

Requiring full accessibility would certainly go to far and would simply be impossible in a general fashion, but it wouldn't hurt to much to force them to actually follow proper USB HID standards or publish the protocol their controller use, to at least make building third party controllers a little easier. Currently even something simple as an arcade stick that works on Xbox360 and PS3 is already a mess, both use USB, except hat Microsoft specifically locks out any unlicensed third party gear. PS3 in that r

Market isn't big enough to make it worth their while. To make the controllers cost effective they would be horrendously expensive for the end-user. Alas that's how business works. TFA notes that he's only sold 800 controllers in the last 30 years,

Why do you assume that all disabled people are that way because they made some stupid decision? Oftentimes, it's because some other person, like a drunk driver, made a stupid decision, but these people have to pay for it. But there's otherwise nothing wrong with them and there's no reason why they should be removed from the gene pool or made to suffer even more than they already are.

Also, you seriously misunderstand how evolution works. Removing a couple of obvious failures from the system doesn't necessarily produce a better gene pool. The genes for stupid behaviors are complex and varied, if they even exist at all, and many, if not most of us, are probably carriers. Furthermore, the stupid are themselves carriers for good genes. By only explicitly selecting the "good" and getting rid of all the undesirables, we not only fail to solve the problem, but we also destroy good genes as well as genetic diversity.

I see a problem with your argument. It ca be found in just four words: "In a fair world." The world is not fair. The world sucks. The world is a place where you are perpetually just One Bad Day from death, crippling injury or financial ruin. A place where the very best of people could get hit by a drunk driver through no fault of their own, and the driver go on to win the lottery. The world does not care for our petty imaginings of fairness or what is right.

You're like (I used this example, because something similar really happened and is well-known):Hey, that dude went to the back of his motor home to make a coffee *while on the freaking highway*, crashed, and now can't walk.

No, the majority of them are asian students with tiny little weens from UIC. There are also several hispanic guys and an equal number of black and white guys. Luis, one of the hispanic guys is an award-winning pastry chef and restauranteur. One of the guys is a University of Chicago economist (dick) and another is a harmonica player whose name you would recognize if you were a blues fan. My guess is that given your penchant for racial stereotypes

No thanks to Microsoft though. The XBOX 360 controllers use some kind of encryption to prevent third parties making their own. Recently some Chinese guys figured out how to bypass it, but until then the only way to make a 360 controller was buy a license from Microsoft.

If you head over to the SRK forums you can see how all the joystick builders have to wire in the PCB from a 360 pad to support it. One chip can do every other console in existence, but a "pad hack" is the only way to connect to a 360. The old

This is a clear case of unintended consequences. Microsoft doesn't care at all about block the sale of these controllers. What they didn't want was a bunch of cheap knock offs making money from their console.

No it would be wise. Thing is that it is probably blocked by a bureaucratic hell at Microsoft. If they where really smart they would offer to give this guy the parts to make these controllers. Probably cost them all of a $1000 and be worth millions in good PR.

For those that would like to see the actual hardware here is the PS2 [quadcontrol.com] and here is the X360 [quadcontrol.com]. I hope he has released the plans so that when he does pass on someone can pick up the torch without having to reinvent the wheel, as these things do look to be seriously complex.

BTW if you are gonna be a dipshit and post old troll crap? Why not do it on one of the articles where there is plenty of fanboy bullshit and nerd rage and NOT on an article where poor cripples are afraid they are gonna lose the only way they

on the Xbox 360? The controllers have special chips in them to lock third parties out? I can see him getting permission, but those chips are complex and hard to come by... Is Microsoft giving him a supply as charity? Kudos if they do.

He's not trying to complete on price w/ Microsoft; So there's nothing stopping him from buying an official controller for each one he builds to get the interface hardware. It just becomes part of the BOM cost.

Then he just has to replace the buttons and joysticks with ones that work for his end-users.

I wondered whether he decided to patent his design, in an effort to license it to a manufacturer. The reason I wonder about this is that if he stops making these because of health or death, no one else will be able to make them either, unless the patent ownership is passed on, sold, or the patent expires. Which would seem like a shame.

Just publish the designs on the web. You don't have to own it to pass it on, you simply have to share it. -- Hiten

I'm not sure, as IANAL, and stuff. But my understanding is, in the U.S. at least, that if a design is patented, then it can't be legally manufactured by an unauthorized party. Publishing the design on the web or other public forum doesn't change the protection a patent offers. Remember, patents and all they describe are all available to the public already from the USPO itself.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to hate on this guy. I admire his work, and he's just the sort of person patents are intended to ben

Patents, like other legal things, can be inherited. If he held the patent (as an individual), then it would just become the property of his next of kin. As we know nothing about who that is, what happens from there is unpredictable. It's of minimal commercial worth, so they would probably just ignore it. Worst case, they sell it to a patent troll. He might have left it unpatented just to avoid such a scenario, or simply because he doesn't want to spend time on the paperwork of an application. There is nothi

I think it's great that there are a handful of people focussing on gamers who would otherwise struggle with standard controllers. I only wish the Sonys, Microsofts, and Nintendos of this world would occasionally take the lead in this research, or at the very least contribute to some R&D once in a while.

Ben Heck was the first name that came to my mind. He may even be able to improve on the design. No offense to Mr. Yankelevitz, but Ben Heck's controllers, even the prototypes, have a fit and finish that I don't quite see in Ken's work.

As a gamer who has a mild neurological condition that limits fine motor control in one of my hands... and have become increasingly annoyed at the complexity of controllers and control schemes (the shoulder buttons on a dualshock controller are particularly hard to reliably control)...

I both salute this man, and I wonder what kinds of games one can actually play with such a controller... the amount of reflexes and reaction time required to play most (90%?) of the games, seems like it would be beyond what you could convey through one of these devices in a useful amount of time..

I found this guy on youtube, rather amazing! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNjWecipbTA [youtube.com] He plays COD WAW, and is pretty good at the zombie levels. He cannot move and aim at the same time, but he manages to get pretty far.

I found this guy on youtube, rather amazing! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNjWecipbTA [youtube.com] He plays COD WAW, and is pretty good at the zombie levels. He cannot move and aim at the same time, but he manages to get pretty far.

I sit on my ass in utter awe. And here I was getting annoyed at the driving scenes in L.A. Noire..... wow.

He puts each controller together by hand, using his engineering skills to solder dozens of switches and circuits. Controllers are offered for just over $200 and include a 1-year warranty for repairs.

"If the bottom line is profit, there's no way to make a profit on these," Yankelevitz said.

Yankelevitz said larger companies and game manufacturers have shown no interest in producing the controllers because the market is so small. He's sold just over 800 of the devices through 30 years. Factory construction of the controller would be cost prohibitive, over $1,000 each.

Considering how much Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo spend on advertising, you'd think they could offer the same service in-house.Even if they gave away the modified controllers for free, they'd more than recoup the cost through increased goodwill and word of mouth.

Basically the controller (which worked in very much the same way as what this guy builds [oneswitch.org.uk]) was $120 by itself, or $180 if you purchased it as a complete package with a new NES. Since a new NES was the same price in stores at the time, it essentially made the controller free if you didn't already have a system.

They used to distribute these to children's hospitals too. And I can't find a link to v

If Mr Yankelevitz's nice designs are not open source, then there should be an alternative design that is.

Have you considered the possibility these controllers may have to be customized for each client or patient? That solutions have to be found for each new generation of controller? That training the user is a problem in itself?

You are all thinking along the right lines in my perspective.If he could publish some of the plans from the past,what the thinking was for the specific controller,and how to formulate the right devices togetherit would be a benefit for the 'home brew' hackers thatwants to help.

open source for the project would just be a benefit forthose that are disabled.

Just think, I got a cnc in my basement, another guyhas spare chips, another has got the tubes they needand everyone could donate to the project. and make g

Because not enough people donate computing time to Folding@home ( http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu] ) instead of leaving those other 1/37 cores run idle.They also have version that runs on that expensive gaming graphics card you've got.It's not much, but it helps me sleep better.

There are some problems in medicine that can be solved by throwing processing power at them. There are a lot more problems that can be solved only by throwing biologists at them. Science needs to go faster. This body is only good for a century, a little more with luck - I need a new one ready before it wears out.